fistfights and shrimp heads

I went to Suseong Lake tonight and sat on a bench to read the first chapter of a book. When the sun went down I took a slow cycle around the lake and sat on another bench at the opposite end, in a small park. The park at night is the idyllic scene in the movie before the gunmen appear, the scene the hero recalls in a slow motion flashback when his drive for vengeance is flagging: lovebirds link arms, toddlers toddle and the old people pace themselves for a circuit of the lake. Except no gunmen appeared, which is how it should be. I think this is what good people get when real life latches onto a healthy routine. I try to go down there as much as possible.

Life doesn't get any more real than when you're in a fist-fight, as I was the weekend before last. It started and ended on the soccer field--he pushed me, I pushed him, I turned around, he kicked me in the gut with the bottom of his soccer cleats. I held his outstretched leg suspended in the air until our teammates could restore order, and though I believe he started it, and though I've been less conciliatory in my post-fight fantasies, we were both gracious about it after a few minutes of thinking. And by all indications my teammates still like me. As they should, I suppose, since the owner of my school bought us brand new uniforms. He wanted to see me play, and the next weekend we opened a box of long sleeve, bright orange uniforms, knock offs of the current Nike style. From a very great distance we look like the Dutch national team. The front says "Football Team ASIA" and the back says the name of my school in Korean. Daegu is famous in Korea for it's muggy weather, so the choice of long sleeves baffles me. I'm number 27 because--get this--it's the only extra extra large, and it fits.

My Korean friend Andrew from Seoul had come down the day before the fight. He works for my aunt Tami, but we've become friends during my visits to the capital and he came down to see Daegu for the first time and to go with me to the East Asian Football Championships that Sunday night, featuring Japan and South Korea. Tami gave us four free tickets, so I invited Jay, another Korean who teaches at my school, and Song, my fifty-something teammate, the one who drives me to and from all of our games and the only person on the team who can speak a lick of English (he told me he once spent 45 days in Denmark once, by way of explanation).

Song smokes thin cigarettes and is always willing to buy beer for anyone who will drink it with him. He works for the city of Daegu, as best I could understand, as a veterinarian. I took this to mean squirrels and strays, but with Andrew's translation I gathered that he specializes in cows. I decided that Song's availability for Sunday afternoons spent drinking at the plastic tables outside convenience stores could mean either that he definitely doesn't have a wife, or that he definitely does. But the sorry state of his t-shirts, which are always stretched out in the collar, and the clutter of the passenger seat in his little car (so that I have to sit in the back when he drives me to games, a VIP with a shabby set of wheels) points to the former. He's got a headlong walk and knows all the back roads in our corner of the city, through vineyards and watermelon patches. My point is, Song makes any group a motley one.

The three Koreans and I brought our tickets down to very good seats, only a couple of rows from the field (which, sadly, is separated from the stands by a track) of Daegu World Cup Stadium. The championship game was preceded by North Korea-China, the two other Northeast Asian nations, and the South Korean crown cheered heavily in favor of the North Koreans. That is, the mostly South Korean crowd--as kickoff of the second match approached, it became clear that our excellent seats happened to be near the epicenter of the Japanese section. A quick history lesson: most Asian countries east of India LOATHE Japan. Of course, for a foreigner, it can be fun to adopt the quirks and biases of the people you live with, so I had come to the game in my red shirt, prepared to cheer especially loud for the Koreans. When we realized the implications, the subversive opportunities, of our seating assignment, I think we all felt a responsibility to represent the rest of the crowd. We were the moles, the double agents. I stopped ribbing Jay for wearing a blue shirt--he hadn't considered that blue is Japan's color--and we turned our attention to chanting, Song chiming in between swigs of beer, along with most of the stadium "Te-Han-Mi-Guk! Te-Han-Mi-Guk!" Nevermind that Japan scraped the game's only goal in the dying minutes; it was most satisfying, jabbing these big words loudly into the ears of our, ahem, former colonial aggressors.

Let's see, what else is newsworthy? Most Korean holidays during my stay here fall on Saturday-Sunday-Monday, which is a huge bummer. I lucked out, though, because my birthday fell on the Tuesday of a four day weekend, two days off in early August for our school's summer break. I went to Seoul and had a fantastic time. We lugged Tami out of bed--for her entire post-surgery convalescence she's been a real drag, following doctor's orders perfectly and lying in bed most of the time--for a quick bite of pizza, her first solid food in weeks. I went out with Andrew and some other office friends (love-struck Dongwon, Hyungju and Jimin from Daegu, and Jeremy Schmidt, who just got to Seoul and graduated with me in May) to a trendy area called Apgujong, south of the river that divides Seoul into old and new. (New is south, old is north, and more interesting, I think, for it's winding roads and hilly neighborhoods.)

I've eaten some things you might like to know about: the head, only, of a shrimp--fried and flattened, it could have been an extra-thin potato chip if not for the brittle antennae. Then there was what looked like an aquatic snail straight from the shell. This one was at Andrew's insistence. We were at a buffet at a fancy hotel here in Daegu, and he couldn't bully me into tasting what looked like a pecan, but was labeled "pupa" on the buffet table. These things make nangmyun (I think that's the spelling) seem easy. Indeed, it is, since it's only cold noodles in an ice-watery broth, spiced up with peppers. I really like it now, but it took the peer pressure of eating it with my soccer team for me to try it for the first time. There's no ingredient that I didn't care for, it was just that, at the time of ordering, a bowl of noodles in ice cold water had never seemed like the most appetizing menu item. Our team orders en masse, however, after each game--the Korean delivery system is a marvel: men on motorbike, steering with one hand and holding a large metal case, full of food, in the other. The food comes in metal or ceramic bowls and the delivery guy comes back in an hour or so to pick up the dirty dishes.

Now a few snippets: I've got a student that can do a 4x4x4 Rubik's cube in under 35 seconds and there's another boy at my academy who every so often wears a shirt that says on the back: "Scream if you wanna go faster," which is a good motto. Another shirt says "Vote For My Daddy."